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Today's Top News
House Goes Nuts Over Net Neutrality
Late Wednesday, Republican members of a key House Commerce subcommittee decided to give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over the Internet.
By a party-line vote of 15 to 8 they passed a "resolution of disapproval" that would strip the FCC of its ability to protect Internet users -- freeing up companies like Verizon and Comcast to block our right to speak freely and share information on the Internet.
This reckless action opens the door even wider to corporate abuse of Net Neutrality, the principle that protects our ability to connect with everyone else online.
Already, cable giants like Comcast are maneuvering to restrict access to competitive video services like Netflix; wireless carrier MetroPCS has unveiled a plan to block users' access to most video and audio sites.
The majority rammed this vote through without weighing widespread concerns -- coming from public interest and consumer advocates, and the tech industry -- that this resolution is an extreme overreach that gives away our basic Internet freedoms.
Damn the Facts
The House is already set to pass this resolution; it moves next to full committee and the floor. Hopefully, the Senate can muster enough common sense to kill the resolution when it crosses Capitol Hill.
House Republicans, on the other hand, seem determined to give phone and cable companies a degree of power over our Internet that is unprecedented in the history of U.S. telecommunications policy.
"Unfortunately, the debate around [Net Neutrality] has become immune to the calming powers of historical fact," said Free Press research director (and colleague) Derek Turner in testimony before the subcommittee.
The line of questioning from members of the subcommittee bore this out. At one point Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-AT&T) claimed that "there was no federal governance of the Internet" before the FCC moved an open Internet order last December.
I'd like to see Rep. Blackburn prove that right-wing whopper. Unfortunately, her time for questions ran out. Had subcommittee witnesses more time to respond, one of them might have told Blackburn that the Nixon administration put in place strong nondiscriminatory rules to ensure that abuses of market power would not stifle the growth of an infant network computing industry.
This successful framework was later improved upon by both the Carter and Reagan administrations. And with the Telecom Act of 1996, a bipartisan Congress recognized that in order to foster new industries, we needed the FCC to act to ensure everyone had open access to the information superhighway.
These facts are merely unfortunate road bumps for a House majority determined to ignore history.
Will the Senate Step Up?
It's now left to the Senate to stop this resolution. If they fail, the FCC could be barred from preventing these companies from blocking any website, banning any speech, and charging you anything they can get away with.
American Internet users need to choose between the open Internet that lets us view any content, anywhere, and the walled garden that the big phone and cable companies want to build around us.
If you choose openness, you had better do what you can to get your senators to reject this resolution.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllThese are the times that try men's (and women's) passwords. Now is the time for all good humans to come to the aid of their internet.
We need the YouTubers who can find the president's campaign promise sound bytes where he spoke in favor of net neutrality to make videos: "Sir, did you mean this or were you lying to us?" and get those out there and alert the bloggers.
I wonder if Wisconsin-style demonstrations could be arranged in favor of net neutrality.
it is the full monty
ruin the economy, constant wars, put people out of work, destroy the dollar, bust the unions, get rid of social security and medicare - and now the 'net
they are the many heads of the one beast - nwo
hello mr rothschild and mr rockefeller - how ya doin'
good? wish we could say the same.....
I'm right there with you, paranoid pessimist and medmedude.
Can someone please turn off that damn fan? We're getting completely splattered over here!
As long as people on the left view the perfectly normal workings of a cpitalist political economy in terms of spooky conspiracies of Rothschilds and such, they will continue to bark up the wrong tree.
The slogan from the 1960's continues to be accurate: "The problem is the system!"
Barking up a wrong tree is better than not barking at all, in my none too humble opinion.
All of these recent events are part of the same fascist playbook. The attacks on labor unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere eliminate any progressive organization that would stand up to the massive corporate power unleashed by Citizens United. The attempt to turn the internet over to corporations will enable CEO's to quickly hit the switches to eliminate the internet as a viable means of communication for progressive protests of the type taking place in Wisconsin.
By eliminating the union infrastructure that enables workers to organize, and by controlling the internet as the means of working middle class people to communicate with one another--the fascists on the far right will have pretty much destroyed all resistance to the Fourth Reich in our own country.
Satan does not work in mysterious ways.
Sadly I could post that for every article here . . . I'll shut up.
The net-neutrality issue is a tough one for people to understand. It shouldn't be. The best way to explain the issue is to simply to point out that when the FCC is empowered to enforce net neutrality, all it is doing is enforcing the First Amendment. When these extemist argue against net neutrality, they are actually arguing that the First Amendment is a big-government regulation that is "anti-freedom" and should be gotten rid of - becasue it impedes the freedom of the wealthy and powerful to suppress ideas they disagree with.
They're position is they ( the rich) own the microphone and the wires and the airwaves and if they don't like something being said over them they should be able to block it. Free speech isn't free as far as their concerned. What they want is FOX 24/7 and if you don't like tough shit.
Exactly.
And more generally, the so-called "libertarian" zeitgeist of Ayn Rand that haunts the wealthy and bourgeois classes is really "freedom" totally inverted. It is the "freedom" enjoyed by a gangster boss, robbber-baron, dictator, king or viceroy - as if such people haven't _always_ enjoyed "freedom" throughout thousands of years of history.
Isaiah Berlin once said that freedom for the wolves means death for the lambs.
Yeah, but don't use that analogy on a libertarian or he will simply reply: "See? inequality is the natural state of things!" And in the case of wolves and lambs, he would be perfectly correct.
But fortunately, Mr, Berlin's analogy is a false one in this case - the correct analogy would be to look at INTRA-species relationships, and if you do, you would find that healthy wolf pack societies in the wild follow rules of cooperative behavior in hunting and rearing the young that are a model of a solidarity based socialistic society. Any wolf that behaved like a capitalist would be either be thrown out of the pack or the pack would die off.
Hell, even my housecats are behave better toward each other than a capitalist!
Everybody believes in free speech when they feel like shooting their mouths off, less so when someone else is saying they find upsetting to listen to.
"there was no federal governance of the Internet" before the FCC moved an open Internet order last December." - right-wing pol.
My DSL internet still comes into my home via a pair of regular telephone wires, and those have always been regulated by the federal government under common-carrier laws, and telephone rates and service have always been regulated by the state's public utility comissions.
Verizon is pushing, and may soon make mandatory switching to FIOS even for just telephone service. Sure it is an improvement (albeit at a cost of energy usage and complexity) but their REAL reason will be to get free of common carrier rules so they can govern what ideas travel down those fibers.
In spite of all the attacks to our collective liberty, at least it feels good knowing we have a leader with the vision, 'political capital' and honest concern to do the peoples' work looking after and defending their precious rights.
Why worry?!
Mmmm, yeah. Indeed, why worry... For surely — and I suspect many others sense it as well — the end times are upon us. I honestly can't wait.
We look at videos coming out of Wisconsin as police haul protesters out of the capitol and we cringe but feel we can do nothing. Allowing corporations to use unlimited funds in elections destroyed any pretense of fair elections and we feel we can do nothing. And on it goes at an ever-increasing pace. The internet was already becoming a tiered communication medium (don't forget it's a small percentage of the worlds' population that was connected anyway) and now with giving total control of it to the corporations, our "free-speech" days are numbered and access to sites like this are going to disappear. It's been nice knowing you.
Yes, "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE ROTHSCHILD BANKER BEHIND THE CURTAIN".
Keep wasting time arguing with the latest "Wizard of Oil" who belches fire and thunders orders in a loud Obooming voice.
TJ
(or shut down the Federal Reserve Bank, which shuts down the money printing press that makes us all WAR-POOR.)